Ukase

So, in trying to answer your question, I look at my own hybrid power options on my character while I'm in-game: Melee, Assault, Control and Support. My character is merely 30, which is why things are a bit dim, but you can make out the words. I've never bothered to figure out what in the world "Special" means. Perhaps this healing is part of that. If it is, I suspect there's an issue somewhere, in that it should boost your healing flames by some measure. As for why it's not...no idea. I did log my fire brute onto brainstorm, and easily swapped in the support radial embodiment to see if there was any change. Getting 767 with my assault core hybrid. I took it out and replaced with the support, and still got 767. For kicks and grins, I swapped out my Musculature Alpha for vigor, and did see the numbers increase to 888. But that's an alpha, which is not really a separate power, but like an extra enhancement. So, the mechanics for how things work is very likely going to be different. Curious, I created an emp defender on brainstorm and insta-50'd to see how this would impact a character that has healing as a significant part of their powerset. Healing aura with a full set of doctored wounds without any hybrid slotted healed for 275. And, same result with the support radial slotted. And, on an aside, perhaps we could have our devs change the wording to be more precise about what "special" actually means.

In the market forum, I revealed just about every thing I do as it pertains to the market. Most of those habits have changed, as I don't play as often as I used to. In a nutshell, each character will craft, convert and sell every uncommon and most rare drops, unless they can use them in their planned build. Salvage, when leveling is kept. All of it, because the last thing I want to do is buy salvage. Since I craft each day I play, I never run out of room. It takes about 2-3 minutes to do this, as I rarely have over a dozen recipes to craft/convert. Common IO recipes are weird. They vendor for more than you can sell them for, so it makes sense to me to vendor them. Additionally, it costs more to craft them at level 50 than it costs to buy them crafted on the AH. So, yeah, definitely vendor them. I'll let the badgers subsidize my need for recharge reduction IOs. I certainly did my share of subsidizing with my several badgers. As for SO/DO drops, they all get sold at the vendor. I generally have my next few levels worth of IOs in my tray so I don't have to be "That guy" that's out of a mission for 10 minutes while the team is doing all the fun/work. It would be annoying to see my trays full, although that hasn't happened in quite some time. I think it was a KM ITF, and I had a windfall running. As for "working the market", I don't really "work" it. As I level, I pay attention to how much this and that enhancement are selling for and look at the number of bids vs the number on hand. As an example, a couple of weeks ago, Shield Breakers, aside from the Chance for Lethal Damage in the set - they were all trash. Selling for less than 1M. Now, suddenly, each of the set are selling for 2.5M+. By the time I post this and you read it, it's possible the price has dropped again, but I can be patient. I also monitor the help chat. Occasionally, someone who wants a specific enhancement will complain that the price is too high, (so I'll look) or there aren't any. (So I'll stop what I'm doing and make some right away, and recheck in an hour and make more if my gut tells me more will be needed in the short term. And, because I wouldn't have known if the player didn't say anything, I'll email them the very enhancement they wanted to get, if the AH was indeed out. A finder's fee, if you will, of a need in the market. I also have a character that bids on 10 of each recipe in several different sets for about 25% of the enhancement cost. I take about 5-10 minutes, depending on how many recipes I paid for, and craft and convert them all into enhancements that bring more value. This is where the bulk of my inf comes from. Some days, I make a billion. Some days, sales are slow and I only make 200M or so. Some days, I have competition, and I have no sales at all and end up with hundreds of millions invested in crafted IOs and have to bring an alt on to hold what won't fit in the AH or the 70 slots in the enhancement trays. They do sell eventually, but it can be annoying to deal with the competition. For whatever reason, they only compete every so often, which is fine with me.

That is a pro-tip I haven't thought about since the last time I made a Dominator.

I have a group every Saturday night that meets up, we started Gold side and will move to red side at level 20...probably this weekend. The thing is - there's no compelling reason to do things on redside unless you just want to. You can be vig and go back and forth. Or be rogue and go back and forth. There's no more reason to identify as red or blue. Just be a shade of gray.

Opinions will vary on this with playstyle preferences, anecdotal experiences and other factors. Let us look at a brute and ask ourselves...how much damage can it do when it's dead? In my opinion, each brute, scrapper, blaster, sentinel, corruptor, ..heck, every AT! should have a balance between dps and survivability. A lot of the more experienced (rich in-game currency) tend to use a lot of the same sets and procs in every character. One guy I know, Stitch, who left HC for another server, is a great player. The dude would speed run MoTFs. "The faster we go, the less time there is to die". I would ask him for build advice, and over the discord, he'd send his build, as he had just about every combo the game could offer up. In these builds, they all had a full set of artillery. a combination of either 5 sets of purples or ATOs, depending on how good the set bonuses were on the ATOs, a full set of reactive defenses, full set of preventative medicine (if the character had some kind of heal) and what I consider the usual procs - miracle +recovery, Numina +regen/recovery, Panacea +HP/End, glad armor 3%, steadfast prot. 3%, shield wall 5%, Kismet 6%, and in some cases a winter set or two. And, one power would probably be proc'ed to the gills for as much damage as he could squeeze out of it. All of them had fold space once that became a thing. I'd look at his defense and resist numbers and they'd be a lot lower than mine. See, I solo fairly often, so my numbers need to be different than someone who pretty much only teams. I can't rely on Fort or Speed Boost. My character needs to be self-sufficient. Stitch's dps was always higher, for sure. He could afford to neglect slotting for defense a little because he had teammates who'd buff that up. So, that's my long-winded answer to your question. Someone has undoubtedly given you a more useful answer in one sentence by now.

So, first question...you can try, but sometimes the game sorts them out differently. You have to go into the file (just a text file) that organizes them and move them yourself in certain case. And sometimes, they stick where you put them. It's a crazy game like that. One thing you might do, since you have this badge focus - sort them by badge count. Second question: I can't speak for you, obviously, at least not with any credibility. I can only tell you why I have duplicate characters. First reason is because they were fun to level up, and I wanted to try for something new. In the case of a ice/ice blaster, I wanted to try to prioritize slows, rather than DPS. And candidly, I can barely tell the difference, except in the teen levels when certain mobs are more susceptible to slows for reasons that escape me. Another reason I have a duplicate character is I simply forgot I had it. 1000 character slots, 10 per page...that's a lot of pages to sift through to see if an at/powerset combo is already there. And in one case is when I tricked myself into thinking I was some kind of speeder. I made a blaster with specific powers for a specific task force. As much DPS as I could swing, and not a care or concern about defense or resistance because that would come from team & destiny buffs. And a few situational powers that ordinarily, I'm not in a situation often enough to justify it's selection. I'm sure others might even have more reasons. As for why you did...I can't judge you; I've made the same mistakes more than once.

So, this is just a suggestion for those that may not be that experienced with Mids. Turn off Vengeance. On my own build, I was killing myself (and the Mids Reborn Discord) trying to figure out why my numbers on Brainstorm and Mids didn't match. I have no idea why, but Vengeance was lit up, creating the illusion of having a lot more defense than the build provides. It's the same way for this Foxhound build (I prefer ranged). It's always interesting to me to see how others mix and match the variety of options in a build. Thank you for sharing yours.

For the first time in a very long time, or maybe ever, I'm playing a PB, and doing the missions from Sunstorm, the PB contact in Atlas. Figuring I'm not the only one who has never done this content (that I recall, certainly not in HC) others may want to join in. Imagine my surprise when a level 11 is told to go to Faultline for a mission. In this day and age of Team Teleport, it wasn't that big of a deal, but when a teammate asked me how to get there, it got me to thinking about the location. I know back in the day, this was a fairly normal thing, heroes hovering over the zone, way up high to avoid getting smacked to death en route to the mission. But that was in The Hollows. And maybe this request is out of line, and should definitely be on the back burner, but it seems to me level 11 characters shouldn't asked to go to a mission in a zone typically reserved for levels 15 to 25. It could be that Sunstorm's content is arranged by level range, and I just happened to catch it earlier than later. I'm really not sure. Anyway, that's my suggestion, that missions given by a contact be in the same zone as that contact, unless there's some reason within the story/lore that it should be somewhere else.

While I have noticed the abyss is missing for some of my characters, it's not missing for all of them. I think the game may consider the Abyss a red-side zone. My rogues can see it in the /search list, but my vigilantes cannot.

Market Analysis: Some item prices go up. Some item prices go down. Some stay the same. Ultimately, the price of any item will rise or fall to where market forces deem they should be. Let us suppose we have two sinister people trying to manipulate the market. Perhaps it would be helpful to think of Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche (from the now old movie "Trading Places", starring Eddie Murphy - the character names were Mortimer and Randolph Duke. They placed a bet over whether they could essentially have Ackroyd and Murphy trade lives - for a whopping 1 dollar, at that. Mortimer chooses to buy ALL the defensive recipes, and ALL the defensive IOs from the market. Even the ones that were listed by very greedy players who may no longer play the game. You know the type - the rascals that placed a bunch of them at 10M, when the going price was about 8M. Old Mortimer cleans all of them out. So, what happens is, Randolph notices this and because he has a training origin enhancement bet on the line with Mortimer, he decides to buy as many of the cheaper non-defensive recipes and IOs he can, and proceeds to craft and convert them ALL into LotG 7.5% (and a few of the rest of them - never know when someone is chasing the other set bonuses) So, despite Mortimer's attempt to drive the price up, Randolph is trying to drive it down - just to win that training enhancement from Mortimer. Mortimer is so crazy. He's been keeping that TO in his pocket since he was level 3 and got a lucky shot in against a Hellion boss back when HC first opened - the very first day! Randolph doesn't need it, of course, but winning it from Mortimer will give him something to boast about for the next several holidays. If the price of LotG 7.5% should be more, the market forces will make that happen. Now, it could be that someone like Yomo may deem themselves a market force. Properly motivated in one direction or another, we would feel that force - for a moment. But not forever. There's too much influence being earned each day to allow any one or few players to control the price of anything like an invention enhancement for long. It may go up. It may go down. It may stay the same.

Ouro doesn't give +rech. Per the HC Wiki, Ourobouros gives a recipe bonus for mission completion. I believe you're thinking of the PvP day job.

If you see Shadeknight's reply to you - in fairness, I did send him quite a bit. I left his name off, not to call him out, or report him. Merely to show why I felt like I was walking on egg shells. When something I say that's meant to be fairly innocuous is so poorly received by so many, common sense says I should look in the mirror. And I did. I never intended for my initial comment to hurt anyone's feelings, only to illustrate the way things seemed to me. And reporting people is appropriate in certain circumstances. I didn't feel this was one of those circumstances.

This is easier to say than to type, but I'll do my best and I can clarify tonight during the crawl. A few months back, in what I would call a fairly heated debate about some of the proposed changes in page 5, I basically said "Y'all are like a gal who, just as soon as she finds a man she loves, she wants to take him in for alterations". No lie - that's not an original thought of mine - it was a line I had to memorize in high school for the play, "Guys and Dolls". So, the setting is from a time when sayings like these are common place - along with words like humdinger and doozy - which are character names of mine, I might add. Apparently, some of our more immature crowd took offense to that comment. And when I say immature, it's kind of a dig, but I really mean the younger folks. This is just an example of one DM I got. I'll omit the name, because that's probably against the rules. **************************** This is a quote, by the way: ***************************** And then I got the privilege of hearing from the mighty exalted Veracor! And in that, he shared that he "always had a low opinion of me" and I'm not welcome in any content led by him. So, screw him and others like him. I will say things the way I wish. And I will apologize if I feel I'm in the wrong, but in that specific context, I wasn't wrong. And if folks got upset, that's not my problem. That wasn't my intention, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. And it's worth pointing out that no GM said anything to me at all about it, because anyone with common sense knows that while the comparison is dated, the meaning of the full comment was and is accurate and absolutely on point from where I sit. And I think that's what really pissed them off. That I dared to show them that they really don't like this game as much as they claim to. If they did, they wouldn't be trying to change it so damned much. And now - here we are...player log in activity is lower than it's ever been. So much so, that a lot of folks want the servers to merge. Torchbearer, Indomitable, Reunion - they might as well be a version of Rebirth or Thunderspy, given the population numbers. I even see some of the roleplayers of Everlasting switching to Excelsior because they're having a rough time finding a team over there, too. That's not to say everything is gloom and doom. The HC devs are doing quality work, even if I don't always like the direction they take things. Over time, the folks that stopped playing here, odds are - they'll return for a spell, probably after each patch. But then they'll go away again. And, to their credit - I raised a big fuss over the vet rewards not working in AE, and they changed that. So, I can never say they don't listen. Clearly, they do. We cannot go back in time. And reverting things back to the way they were, even if the HC devs were convinced it was the right thing to do would probably do more harm than good. I would just encourage them to measure twice and cut once. There's no need to install all the changes immediately or as soon as possible. Leave things on brainstorm for a few months. Give your busy casual players time to not only try what's there, but to actually think about how the change will impact them, and others they know. Limit the changes each patch. If HC ever gets any kind of licensing agreement from NCSuck, (I am not holding my breath), then they can open the floodgates of change. Until then, be very cautious. Because while the changes were implemented successfully, you can look at the increase in Thunderspy and Rebirth, and even Purrgatory and see that is where many of the players from here went. I have said to the Cosmic Council SG leader once - keep treating this SG like it's yours and soon you'll be the only one in it. So, I'll adapt that to this context: Keep treating this game like it's yours, and soon you'll be the only ones playing it.

So, my advice would be to go to Ouro. Start wherever you like - the top or the bottom. And do them all. Then, and I know it sounds crazy - change your alignment the old school way. Using Null ...and trust me, I'm super grateful we have the option - but there are a lot of missions in those tips that were new to me. For someone like me who likes to zip through, they don't always make it easy. And you'll likely get tired of seeing Blast Furnace before it's over, but it is different content than what most of us have become used to. And after you've gone from Hero to villain (or vice-versa), go back to Ouro and do it again.

My thoughts are a bit jumbled. I have played here, of course. I played on Rebirth during the summer of 2021. I still play here, but only once a week to lead a small group, during which we seem to do our best to see if we can get the others to groan out loud due to the pain of bad puns and other off-the-wall commentary. When I load up Thunderspy - this is what I see: I do not get that impression here. I get the impression that I have to walk on eggshells here. Thankfully, I love the crunching sound under my feet. To HC's credit, they recognized that running the same content over and over for incarnate loot can get stale. Enter in the vet level rewards. Maybe they're too much. Or maybe they're just enough. Opinions will vary. They don't have that option on Tspy. In fact - there is no farming in AE on Thunderspy. Thunderspy has a much lower population. But so far, the only thing I haven't been able to do is a magisterium. We're still waiting on some Task Force Junkies to get something in lore & destiny.

I should have been more precise in my wording. I've never truly "missed" 7x in a row. It would be like 2 misses, and 5 "deflected".

More often than not, the circles I travel in lean towards -HP (Degenerative) or Reactive (-dam resistance). Now, I am only trusting that @Caddaric has some inside knowledge, because the game itself doesn't say so anywhere in any description that I've encountered, and the "pearl" was that only 5 interfaces will work on a given target at a time. So, it can pay to have some folks with t-3 and some with t-4, because they are essentially classed as different interfaces. Or, some with radial, and others with core. Either way, they'd be different. I have used Cognitive - and it works well, but it doesn't (anecdotal evidence only) work long enough to sit back and watch the carnage. They don't stay confused long enough to take any of the npcs out as I recall. (it's been since live, and while I am not "old", I certainly am older and may be having some sort of perception bias) A quick trip to brainstorm could show you. I've also used Spectral, and noted it worked because of the immobilization. If it weren't for my experimenting with these options, I'd be hard pressed to verify that these work in any fashion at all. There's probably some element of proof in the combat logs, but things process so fast in there, I'd have a rough time proving it. Still, I find most characters will choose something to strengthen what their positive attributes are. Farmers, for example, would routinely get reactive. My ice blaster would use degenerative for something like a Magi, but ordinarily would get Gravatic to aid in slowing the recharge. It's really difficult to know how well it works. Confusion, Immobilization, a tiny degree of endurance drain -- those are things I can see. But a -recharge is tough to see. Facing an NPC, outside of Elite Bosses and AVs, they don't last long enough to tell. And EBs and AVs are generally too resistance to such things. So, ultimately, unless it's a specific purpose like a RHW badge, it doesn't matter to me.

It all depends on what you're up to when you play. If you're routinely out clobbering npcs at +4, then a higher accuracy is in order. Particularly if the npcs have a habit of debuffing accuracy or have particularly high defense. Think of Vampyri, Spectral demons for the former, and Rikti drones for the latter. When these npcs are +4 to you, it can be more than a bit annoying to hit "Aim" and then your t-9 and whiff. Repeatedly missing because your attack was "deflected". That nifty rule about only missing 3 times in a row doesn't seem to apply here. I've missed against a level 54 drone on my standard level 50 blaster 7 times in a row before I finally got him. But that was only with a kismet 6% and whatever accuracy comes with the global set bonuses. No tactics or Focused Accuracy. Anecdotally, I don't ever worry about accuracy because of the kismet. It's generally enough with the kismet, and when it's not, I can use the yellow inspirations.

Fixed that for you.

I play chess, too. Once, I saw my opponent take his bishop from g6 to b2 in an effort to capture a pawn and threaten my lazy rook that was still in the corner. If you look at a chess board, you can see that a "white" bishop (nothing racist there, it's the bishop that is allowed to travel on the white colored squares, diagonally) doesn't get to suddenly become a "black" bishop. (Nothing racist there, either. It simply denotes the bishop that travels on the dark squares. Not sure why they don't use dark bishop and light bishop. It's just the terminology used in chess.) As for the rich player "hacks", It can be difficult to find the specific inspirations you're looking for, particularly mid-fight! Just for me, when I play, all the purples are lucks. The yellows, I don't refer to them as "insights" or "imbuements", just yellows. Same with reds. So, when I see all these various names, I know they tend to be in alphabetical order, but I rarely know the specific name for them and always struggle to find them. If I think about it, I try to raid the email before the fighting starts, but even then, I'd use what's in the tray and struggle to pull the right ones from email. Not that I'm rich or anything...

I like cookies. Well, most cookies. I do not care for those that have dead grapes in them. But I digress. If I like a chocolate chip cookie, and then the universe, in it's prolific wisdom begins to pay certain people to put out the message that the chocolate chip cookie name is offensive to all other cookies and should be called a chocolate pieces cookies instead, it's still going to taste the same, whatever it's called. - OR - You heroes that play corruptors and other traditionally villain ATs, you think you're being heroic. But you're not looking at the big picture. You're evil, you're just too ignorant to realize it.

This is, I believe, a fair explanation. The quality of stories vary, and candidly, the evaluation is entirely subjective beyond spelling and grammar. I look at the HM ITF, as an example. It has some amusing things, interesting mechanics, and different strategies for various encounters. And yet, there are many of us that are reward driven, or driven just for speed of accomplishment. It's unrealistic to expect any new content to please everyone. The players would gobble up a new powerset, a new zone with multiple arcs within a month. And then there's a want for more. For a volunteer staff, they give us far more than I would have ever expected. Page 3...well, for me, it was really too much at once. But that's just my thought. Snarky is right on one point, there's a lot to read in the red side dialogues. There's also a lot of content in the Shadow Shard that often gets forgotten. Gold side - including First and Night Ward also have a fair bit of content, if you're inclined to read it. Another story line that may have escaped you is something that's not in Ouro as far as I know - the Kheldian story lines, if you're a PB or WS.

I say no, until he apologizes for the way he treated me. He was a jerk.

I leave it the same way I found it, except I click on "1" to make a chat box specifically for SG chatter.

Me, I would have reported them - but not because it was a copyright issue, but because they were too lazy to come up with something on their own. I can get behind an homage type of situation, but a mini-HeroName isn't exactly in the same frame.